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There is a methadone clinic on the main street of the small town where I live, a hamlet in Ontario’s near north that is equidistant from both Toronto and Ottawa, and heavily reliant on tourism to help defray rising property taxes as its commercial base continues to recede.

Its population is only 3,500, yet it now has a methadone clinic.

It seems almost unthinkable.

To substance abuse experts, however, the sudden appearance of a methadone clinic was not a case of build it and they will come, but a case of build because it is needed.

Perhaps there should be a placard outside that reads, “Brought to you by the makers of OxyContin.”

It would not be entirely fiction.

There are many reasons why small towns such as mine fall victim to opiate and opioid addiction.

And there is lots of blame to go around that transcends simply small-town boredom — like over-prescribing or over-trusting doctors, conniving patients, doctor shopping, black market suppliers associated with big-city gangs, and locals looking for easy money to feed their own habit.

And then there is Oxy itself.

It’s too good to be true, and therein lies the problem.

Even legitimate users of the drug, those being treated for injury-induced back pain, for example, are turned into accidental addicts.

If anyone is blameless, it is them.

Until a few months ago, opiate addicts from the surrounding region fighting to take an edge off their dependency had to go out of town to get their methadone soothers, a daily round trip of several hours until trust and drug testing permitted them a week’s worth of “take aways.”

But not anymore.

The new methadone clinic in my little town is tucked away behind a small but brand-new pharmacy between the weekly newspaper office and a hip computer-repair shop that also serves as a cafe.

There is no sign advertising what it is, of course, but it’s there, directly across the street from a full-operation pharmacy that fills prescriptions, sells lottery tickets, cosmetics, gifts and even caters to last-minute grocery shopping.

Everyone knows the little pharmacy across the street is no normal pharmacy.

All you have to do is listen to the whispers.

The epidemic of narcotic addiction across this country triggered by OxyContin dependency cannot be exaggerated, especially when its own manufacturer recently decided to take it off the market, and replace it with a brand called OxyNeo that is supposedly harder to abuse.

But a new hell is just around the corner.

At the end of the month, the patent on OxyContin will expire, leaving the field open for competing drug manufacturers to create generic and therefore less expensive versions of the narcotic which has well-earned its nickname of Hillbilly Heroin.

This will open the gates of the aforementioned hell.

Provincial health ministers like Ontario’s Deb Matthews want the feds to step in and put a ban on OxyContin clones, but she is either whistling into the wind or drinking the bong water.

Legal experts are already indicating that the federal government cannot simply toss out long-established drug patent laws to block a version of one drug yet not stop another.

There’s the rock, and there’s the hard place.

So hell it is.

Before OxyContin got yanked from the shelves, each 80 mg pill — its most-potent strength — was selling in pharmacies for $484 per

100 tablets, plus dispensing.

On the street, however, that $4.84 pill was selling for upwards of $50 to $85.

For a single pill.

If a biological equivalent of OxyContin gets produced and sold at a third of the costs of the patented version ­— which is the norm — then the laws of supply and demand will make it a win-win for both dealer and addict. And, if it was street cost that kept the curious on the straight and narrow, well, those days will soon be kissed away.

The worst, therefore, has yet to come.

But it will come.

— Bonokoski is QMI Agency’s national editorial writer

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